1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to analyzing business processes, and more particularly, to systems, devices and methods for compiling and conveying behaviors and associated conditions of business processes.
2. Description of the Related Art
When automating a business process, building a business process model or changing an existing automated system or business model, a substantially comprehensive understanding of the business process or the behavior of the system is needed. Typically, this understanding is achieved manually by reading specifications, reading business manuals and creating business flow diagrams. Further, knowledge of behaviors in the business process as well as conditions leading to those behaviors and variations of the behaviors should be acquired to generate accurate business flow diagrams.
Extensive knowledge of business process behaviors and associated conditions is also needed when creating test cases for a developed business process system or model. Here, test cases are generally created from specifications and manuals of the business. For enhanced testing, complicated portions of the business process in which many conditions are considered in the system or model should be tested. Thus, to enable enhanced testing, such complicated portions need to be identified from the documents and compiled in a facilitative manner.
In general, for each actor in a business process, his or her actions or behaviors can be described in a multitude of different documents. Thus, when they are identified manually, there is a relatively high risk that some important descriptions may be overlooked. If search engines and systems are used to collect this information, then the function or action descriptors need to be known in advance for insertion into the query. However, comprehensive search queries can lead to a retrieval of a very large number of descriptions as results, leading to tedious and time consuming review of these results to identify relevant descriptions and determine the complex conditional behaviors of a business process.